'Worms From Hell' Unearth Possibilities For Extraterrestrial Life 145
An anonymously submitted article says, "For the first time, scientists have found complex,
multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface, raising new possibilities about the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons (abstract). ... The research is likely to trigger scientific challenges and cause some controversy because it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist."
Re:Linky! (Score:4, Insightful)
yup, it works. why dont we make you an editor instead of the random guy that approved the article?
Re:Rules for life (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not arguing that earth-like conditions are a necessity, but that there are hard limits on conditions. If you want to have life you need a chemistry that is sufficiently complex to store information and to build structures. With that, you are down to carbon. Nothing else (with the very, very low possibility of silicon being an exception) makes a sufficiently complex chemistry. You need metabolism, so you need some kind of energy gradient and therefor chemical dynamics on a timescale that makes exploiting that gradient possible. Another hard limit. Those limits are not given by taking earth as a standard, this is basic thermodynamics, in the end.